Forbidden Love

The governor of a women’s prison has admitted that he had sex with a prisoner who played a crucial role in a brutal kidnapping and murder. Despite the end of the relationship after her release, he denies he was manipulated

A disgraced (mất chức) prison governor “has no regrets” after admitting having sex with a female inmate who made headlines in 2006 as the honey trap (bẫy mỹ nhân kế) in a notorious kidnapping and murder case (vụ án bắt cóc và giết người) .

Florent Goncalves, 42, (pictured) whose trial for having an inappropriate relationship (có quan hệ không phù hợp) with an inmate and for providing her with mobile phone SIM cards began on Wednesday, faces up (đối mặt) to three years in prison and a hefty fine (món tiền phạt lớn).

He described the relationship in a book titled “Forbidden Love”, which hits the shelves on Thursday.

“I told myself repeatedly that what I was doing was an act of idiocy (hành động điền cuồng),” wrote Goncalves of his growing affection for the woman, known only as “Emma S” because she was 17 years old when convicted (bị kết án).

“And yet today I have no regrets about that idiocy, despite all the suffering and damage it has caused.”

The affair was exposed (bị lộ ra) in early 2011 and Goncalves was immediately suspended from his job. His partner, who is the mother of their daughter, left him soon after.

But when his illicit lover () was released on bail in September 2011, Goncalves had to come to terms with (nhận ra thực tế ?) the fact that their relationship was nothing but an empty fantasy.

“In the space of a few hours I realised that my whole life had been turned upside down for a dream,” he wrote. “I’d waited for seven months to come to the conclusion that we had no future together.”

Three weeks of torture

Emma, now 23, was sentenced to nine years in 2006 for luring 23-year-old Parisian Ilan Halimi to meet her for a supposed “date”.

Instead, Halimi was abducted by a gang called who called themselves “The Barbarians” , who subjected him to three weeks of torture in a Paris suburb while they tried to extort money (khảo tiền) from his family.

Gang leader Youssouf Fofana was convicted of killing the 23-year-old Jewish man, and was sentenced to life in prison after judges ruled that (kết luận rằng) the murder was racially motivated (có động cơ kỳ thị chủng tộc).

Emma, who arrived in France in 1998 as an 11-year-old refugee from Iran and was living with her mother, found herself incarcerated (bị tống giam) at a prison in Versailles, south-west of Paris, where Goncalves was governor.

According to Goncalves’s book, the relationship started in 2009, when he began a clandestine correspondence and gave her mobile phone SIM cards, which are illegal in prison.

He went on to describe how the pair fell headlong into a relationship “marked by passion and jealousy” and that they had sexual relations twice while she was incarcerated.

‘Profound personal humiliation’

Despite the relationship’s abrupt end, Goncalves insists that he had acted out of (hành động vì, xuất phát từ) love and was not manipulated by Emma.